How to Draw Foliage
- 1). Draw the branches of the tree or shrub. This provides you with a skeleton on which to base the shape of your foliage. Press the pencil lightly when drawing the outline of the branches because, as you fill in the foliage, parts of the branch will become obscured by leaves and will need to be erased.
- 2). Draw small wiggly lines, using a hard pencil, to represent the background foliage around the branches in the background. This saves you from picking out each individual leaf in the background, a practice that is inaccurate as this is not what the human eye or a camera would do. Instead, use different concentrations of wiggly lines to represent where the foliage is at its most dense, bringing your lines closer together at these points and drawing them further apart for sparser areas.
- 3). Draw curled lines to represent fully formed leaf shapes as you get nearer to the foreground. At this point, there is still no need to sketch leaves in their full detail; instead, create the actual shapes of the leaves to give the drawing dynamism and lead the viewer's eye to the foreground. As you get closer to the foreground, begin picking out individual leaves and drawing not only their shapes, but also the lines of their stems bisecting them and their stalks.
- 4). Draw the outlines of the leaves that you want to highlight in the foreground. The size of these leaves depends upon the size of the leaves you drew in the middle distance; a consistent reduction in size between objects in the foreground and objects further back is the key to creating a realistically proportioned sketch.
- 5). Draw in the details of each leaf. These can include the outlines of small weevil holes, dark spots or even tiny caterpillars. If you cannot see any of this detail on your subject, then your perspective is at a distance where this detail does not need to be included.
- 6). Sketch the tone and shading on the leaf using the flat side of a pencil. Observe how the leaves toward the top of the branch block out the light for leaves lower down the branch. Reflect this in your drawing by shading the leaves on top very lightly and shading the leaves beneath them more heavily. Shade from the middle of the leaf outward toward the tips -- this ensures that tonal shading follows the growth patterns of the leaf.
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